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Comment by boricj | Hacker News Reader

That reminds me of my own Samsung Galaxy SII.

Shipped out of the box with Android 2.3, Samsung supported it up until Android 4.1, then I switched to CyanogenMod until my father rage-bought me a new phone in 2016 because it crashed so much he had trouble contacting me. I still kept it up to date with LineageOS and then unofficial versions for fun (it's at Android 13 last I checked).

Do I expect a Samsung Galaxy SII to do as well with 2026 software as it did in 2013? No, but I can run a 2013 computer with 2026 software without needing to track down dodgy homebrews on xdaforums.com and that reflects badly on the smartphone ecosystem.

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>That reminds me of my own Samsung Galaxy SII. Shipped out of the box with Android 2.3, Samsung supported it up until Android 4.1

Even that was amazing for Samsung's standards back then.

For example my former Samsung Note II shipped with Android 4.1.1 Jellybean and they only supported it till 4.4.2 KitKat. Just let that sink in. I basically bought a flagship e-waste device.

Custom ROMs didn't help much since you'd lose S-pen functionality if you went past 4.4.2 as modders couldn't port the needed firmware blobs past that kernel or something like that.

Oh, and also, using custom ROMs could brick your wifi from working as the FW of the wifi chip was tied to Knox tripping the e-fuse on custom ROMs, so then you'd need to use some voodoo to patch wifi back. That is, if you were lucky and your phone wouldn't brick itself due to the FW bug in Samsung's eMMC, that would lock itself to read-only mode out of nowhere.

Seriously, fuck Samsung for that PoS phone, fuck them in the a**. That phone should have been a lemon recall with full refund to consumers.

I rooted my old S3 probably around 2016 I had laying around. There was an exploit called "let it rain" and that got me root access. Then on XDA Developers I found several custom ROM'S. Someone even created a Nougat ROM for that thing later on. That was the last version I was able to load on it. I sure did learn a lot back then.

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